8 Basic Editing Commands

Here we explain the basics of how to enter text, make corrections, and save the text in a file. If this material is new to you, we suggest you first run the Emacs learn-by-doing tutorial, by typing Control-h t inside Emacs. (help-with-tutorial).

To clear and redisplay the screen, type C-l (recenter).

• Inserting Text: Inserting text by simply typing it.
• Moving Point: Moving the cursor to the place where you want to change something.
• Erasing: Deleting and killing text.
• Basic Undo: Undoing recent changes in the text.
• Files: Visiting, creating, and saving files.
• Help: Asking what a character does.
• Blank Lines: Making and deleting blank lines.
• Continuation Lines: How Emacs displays lines too wide for the screen.
• Position Info: What page, line, row, or column is point on?
• Arguments: Numeric arguments for repeating a command N times.
• Repeating: Repeating the previous command quickly.